Reply to “The Imperative for Social Foundations Revisited: A Technical Comment on Warren and Venzant Chambers (2020)

Our 2020 Educational Researcher article, “The Imperative of Social Foundations to (Urban) Education Research and Practice,” emphasizes three particular social foundations of education (SFE) subdisciplines (sociology of education, history of education, and philosophy of education) to demonstrate the strength and necessity of SFE as a multi-perspectival approach to resolving persistent education justice dilemmas. In their technical comment, Aydarova et al. (2022) insist that our article potentially facilitates “erasure of SFE’s complexity and interdisciplinarity” (p. 289). They, like us, care deeply that SFE be understood as indispensable to advancing racial justice in and beyond education research, policy, and practice. These scholars foreground the invaluable contributions of anthropology of education to oppose racism and accentuate justice-oriented education alternatives. This essay responds to the technical comment by clarifying what we find to be a fundamental misinterpretation of our argument and, ultimately, its scholarly purpose. Not only do we contend with our colleagues’ concern that our work is reductionist, we demonstrate how Aydarova et al.’s urgent call to foreground SFE’s interdisciplinary nature further underscores the central argument made in our 2020 paper.